"I am not defending Paul's ideas, Colonel. I have a great sympathy with tyrants myself. You must talk to him. He will amuse you."
"My word! It's a ticklish kind of amusement when _we_ get talking. Why, the boy wants to turn the poor old world upside down--make us all stand on our heads to give our feet a rest. Now, I respect my feet,"--the colonel drew them in a little as the lady's eyes involuntarily took the direction of his allusion,--"I take the best care I can of them; but I propose to keep my head, such as it is, on top, till I go under altogether. These young philanthropists! They assume that the Hands and the Feet of the world, the class that serves in that capacity, have got the same nerves as the Brain."
"There's a sort of connection," said Mrs. Bogardus carelessly. "Some of our Heads have come from the class that you call the Hands and Feet, haven't they?"
The colonel admitted the fact, but the fact was the exception. "Why, that's just the matter with us now! We've got no class of legislators. I don't wish to plume myself, but, upon my word, the two services are about all we have left to show what selection and training can do. And we're only just getting the army into shape, after the raw material that was dumped into it by the civil war."
"I was--a West Pointer, madam; and I was true to my salt and false to my blood. But, the flag over all!--at the cost of everything I held dear on earth." After this speech the colonel looked hotter than ever and a trifle ashamed of himself.
Mrs. Bogardus's face wore its most unobservant expression. "I don't agree with Paul," she said. "I wish in some ways he were more like other young men--exercise, for instance. It's a pity for young men not to love activity and leadership. Besides, it's the fashion. A young man might as well be out of the world as out of the fashion. Blood is a strange thing," she mused.
The colonel looked at her curiously. In a woman so unfrank, her occasional bursts of frankness were surprising and, as he thought, not altogether complimentary. It was as if she felt herself so far removed from his conception of her that she might say anything she pleased, sure of his miscomprehension.
"He is not lazy intellectually," said the colonel, aiming to comfort her.